Prof. Ourselin is Director of the Wellcome/EPSRC Centre for Surgical and Interventional Sciences WEISS). He is currently Vice-Dean (Health) at the Faculty of Engineering Sciences, Director of the Institute of Healthcare Engineering and of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Medical Imaging, Head of the Translational Imaging Group (over 100 staff) within the Centre for Medical Image Computing (CMIC) and Head of Image Analysis at the Dementia Research Centre (DRC). He has published over 400 articles and raised over £40M as Principal Investigator. He was elected MICCAI Society Fellow in 2016.Before joining UCL, he founded and led the CSIRO BioMedIA Lab, Australia. He led the image analysis research program of the Australian Imaging, Biomarker & Lifestyle Flagship Study of Ageing (AIBL) study and the development of a successfully commercialized surgical simulator for colonoscopy.He is currently leading the translational imaging research program between CMIC and the UCL Institute of Neurology, and has established in collaboration with Prof Nick Fox a new imaging unit at Queen Square to deliver engineering solutions for clinical trials. In collaboration with Prof. John Duncan, he has deployed an image-guided neurosurgery platform within the interventional MRI environment at Queen Square for temporal lobe epilepsy. This work built the foundation to expand the research programme into neurosurgical planning and robotic-assisted depth electrode implantation in partnership with Medtronic. He is also leading the development of the open-source NifTK platform. Most of these activities are underpinning GIFT-Surg’s technological foundations, an Innovative Engineering for Health grant funded by the Wellcome Trust and EPSRC. In collaboration with KU Leuven, GIFT-Surg will deliver a new platform for fetal therapy and surgery through a unique combination of innovative interventional imaging systems and advanced surgical tools offering new levels of visualisation, flexibility and precision. In 2015, he founded a UCL spin-out company aiming at delivering automatic quantitative imaging through PACS-embedded clinical reports (Brainminer Limited). The company has raised so far over £1M by leveraging a uniquely patented technology enabling robust brain parcellation.

IMAGE-GUIDED NEUROSURGICAL TREATMENT OF EPILEPSY

More than 50 million people worldwide are affected by epilepsy which is uncontrolled in one third of the cases, causing physical, psychological and psychiatric disability and death. Neurosurgical treatment of refractory focal epilepsy is potentially curative, greatly improves quality of life and is cost-effective. Currently, accessibility is impaired and delayed by the complexity of the work-up and concern about adverse effects. This talk will focus on our current research programme in image-guided neurosurgery, EpiNav™, developed in conjunction with our clinical partners at the National Hospital for Neurosurgery and Neurology to assist in planning and guiding surgical interventions for epileptic patients. Our ultimate goal is to develop an image-guided solution to the whole epilepsy surgery pathway, including computer-assisted planning, robotic placement of intracranial electrodes, and 3D image-guided resections.Whilst epilepsy is our exemplar, these advances are relevant to all cranial neurosurgery, particularly to directing biopsies, tumour resections, and novel minimally invasive treatments such as deep brain stimulation, ablations, or local drug delivery.

Brad Nelson has been the Professor of Robotics and Intelligent Systems at ETH Zürich since 2002. He has over thirty years of experience in the field of robotics and has received a number of awards in the fields of robotics, nanotechnology, and biomedicine.

SOFT MICROROBOTICS AND ITS APPLICATION IN MEDICINE

​The field of micro and nano robotics has made impressive strides over the past decade as researchers have created a variety of small devices capable of locomotion within liquid environments. Robust fabrication techniques have been developed, some devices have been functionalized for potential applications, and therapies are being actively considered. While excitement remains high for this field, a number of challenges must be addressed if continued progress towards clinical relevance is to be made, including the development of bioerodable and non-cytotoxic microrobots, development of autonomous devices capable of self-directed targeting, catheter-based delivery of microrobots near the target, and tracking and control of swarms of devices in vivo.

As we consider advancements that are on the horizon, it becomes clear that the field of micro and nanorobotics is moving away from hard microfabricated devices and towards soft, polymeric structures capable of shape modification induced by environmental conditions and other “smart” behaviors. Just as the field of robotics witnessed the emergence of “soft robotics” in which soft and deformable materials are used as primary structural components, the field of microrobotics is beginning to experience a move towards “soft microrobots.” Soft microrobots are made of soft, deformable materials capable of sensing and actuation and have the potential to exhibit behavioral response. As we develop more complex soft microrobots, we are poised to realize intelligent microrobots that autonomously respond to their environment to perform more complex tasks.

Nicolas Padoy is an Associate Professor at the University of Strasbourg, holding a Chair of Excellence in medical robotics within the ICube laboratory. He leads the research group CAMMA on Computational Analysis and Modeling of Medical Activities, which focuses on computer vision, activity recognition and the applications thereof to surgical workflow analysis and human-machine cooperation during surgery. He graduated with a Maîtrise in Computer Science from the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon in 2003 and with a Diploma in Computer Science from the Technische Universität München (TUM), Munich, in 2005. He completed his PhD jointly between the Chair for Computer Aided Medical Procedures at TUM and the INRIA group MAGRIT in Nancy. Subsequently, he was a postdoctoral researcher and later an Assistant Research Professor in the Laboratory for Computational Interactions and Robotics at the Johns Hopkins University, USA. In 2015, Nicolas Padoy was awarded the Guy Ourisson Prize from the Cercle Gutenberg, which recognizes promising young researchers in Alsace. He is also the 2017 Program Chair of the International Conference on Information Processing in Computer Assisted Interventions (IPCAI).​

Computer Vision for the Surgical Control Tower

The modern operating room relies on high-tech digital equipment that exchange, generate or display signals containing key information about the surgical process. Currently, these signals are being used uniquely for the immediate performance of the surgery. In this talk, I will present the concept of a Surgical Control Tower that makes use of such surgical signals to capture, detect, recognize and analyze the clinical activities taking place in the operating room. I will first describe the clinical motivation underlying the development of such a Surgical Control Tower and then present research performed in my lab to exploit the large amount of multimodal data that is generated in the operating room. I will focus on computer vision methods that we have developed for surgical activity recognition and articulated clinician detection using a multi-view perception system installed in several operating rooms on the Strasbourg medical campus. I will present both qualitative and quantitative results on challenging datasets recorded in operating rooms during live surgeries. Finally, I will illustrate these methods on two applications: radiation safety monitoring during X-ray guided minimally-invasive procedures and real-time activity analysis during laparoscopic surgery.

Wednesday, November 22, 2017 -- 09:15-10:00

Dr. Jean-Michel Lemée​CHU Angers, France, recipient of the 2015 CAMI prize of the French National Academy of Surgery

Dr Jean-Michel Lemée is Assistant Professor in Neurosurgery in the University hospital of Angers. His clinical practice includes cranial and spinal surgery with a specialization in surgical oncology and brain tumors. His research topics are the molecular biology of glioblastoma, the laser speckle imaging and its application to Neurosurgery and the fMRI

Laser speckle imaging and neurosurgery: development of a dedicated ​prototype and clinical applications

The identification of language functional brain areas (LFBA) is essential in Neurosurgery since their identification and their preservation is mandatory to preserve the patient’s language after the surgery. However the identification of LFBA is delicate because of an important interindividual variability. We have evaluated a new technique for identifying these LFBA: speckle laser imaging (LSI).

The LSI is based on the analysis of the diffraction of a coherent beam of light against an irregular surface, which allows us to follow the movements of the erythrocytes and to extract a mapping of the cerebral blood flow in real time from the set of the studied areas, as well as its variations during the intervention. This makes it possible to identify the LFBA by comparing the local blood flow of the different brain areas during language tests compared to the resting basic blood flow.

We tested different laser speckle imagers available on the market, not suitable for intraoperative use in Neurosurgery. We have therefore developed "from A to Z" a new speckle laser imager dedicated to intraoperative use in Neurosurgery, with dedicated equipment and dedicated analysis software. The imager was tested in the animal confirming the possibilities of identifying the local variations of the cerebral blood flow by LSI. We also carried out a preliminary study in a patient operated in waking surgery to validate this technique, with a perfect concordance between the LSI and the reference techniques, all identifying the left supramarginal gyrus as a LFBA. An application for a clinical trial is underway and this innovative work was rewarded with an award from the French National Academy of Surgery.

Wednesday, November 22, 2017 -- 10:30-11:15

DR. Marc-Olivier GauciCHU Nice, France -- recipient of the 2016 CAMI prize of the French National Academy of Surgery

Marc-Olivier Gauci is an orthopedic surgeon from Nice (Institut Universitaire Locomoteur et du Sport, IULS, CHU de Nice). His daily practice includes upper limb surgery. He has skills in microsurgery, arthroscopy and arthroplasty. He is currently involved in a PhD both in the LATIM laboratory (Inserm 1101, Brest) and in IMASCAP. His research field and publications are about the 3D shoulder morphometry and its modelisation in arthritic shoulder. He contributes to develop patient specific instrumentation and prosthesis and to improve computer assisted surgery in arthroplasty.

Tridimensional planification and patient-specific instrumentation in total shoulder arthroplasty: solutions to improve the implants positioning and the postoperative range of motion.

Total shoulder arthroplasty is commonly used in shoulder arthritis. The demand for shoulder arthroplasties continues to increase but also the rate of revision for failure. Positioning of the implants is a critical parameter in glenoid loosening and in postoperative range of motion. Automatic segmentation and computer assisted tridimensional planification allows the surgeons to anticipate the difficulties during surgery, to generate 3D printed patient-specific guides and may optimize the operating time. The aim of this presentation is to expose our results about the accuracy of the patient specific guides in vivo and in daily practice, the contribution of 3D printed patient-specific instrumentation after a computer assisted planification and the improvement we can expect in postoperative range of motion.